© 2025 Marc Bubel

Zen is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word chan, which means meditation. 

Meditation is a concept that independently emerged in Greece, India and China at least 2,500 years ago.

Back in their day, meditation was a form of contemplation and reflection. There are two reasons for this:

The first was because writing materials were in limited supply and most of the population was illiterate. Through reflecting on something time and time again, they remembered what was important. 

The second was because having patience to contemplate something was effective at achieving our ambitions, far more effective than impulsively acting or speaking.

The reason why we associate meditation with Eastern philosophies is because our eastern ancestors encouraged the general population to meditate.

Now, why would they do that?

Unlike in Greece where they contemplated abstract concepts like cosmology, politics, and metaphysics, our eastern ancestors had wisdom to share that enabled people to clear their minds of all the noise. 

Like the following:

The wise person knows what he does not know.

With small pieces of wisdom like this, they assembled them into larger ideas, much like an assembly instruction for building furniture. This is where it gets very interesting.

Each approach to meditation aimed to advance the everyday person to have a disposition that could work through disagreements and coincidentally build toward achieving concepts like heaven on earth. Easterners called it nirvana and moksha.

Imagine each approach to meditation was like a road trip between Buenos Aires, Argentina to Anchorage, Alaska. We can take any path between these two points, but rest assured, we’ll pass through the narrow country of Panama. 

Panama represents a common node between the beginning and end goal that many religions and philosophies share.

Eventually, the more I studied the different paths I found more nodes. It's like mapping the genome for an organism. Eventually, a complete structure of nodes materialized from beginning to end, which zigged and zagged as detailed as a lightning bolt. 

I found that generations since the origin of each philosophy introduced improvements. Like seeing a dirt footpath path through a city park. As a result, later generations helped smoothen the lightning-bolt structure. 

Sometimes they reduced the number of nodes between two points. But not always. Some petered out into nothing; sometimes they found intermediate goals that led to dead ends where we find…the ignorance of bliss. 

The end result of my 30 years of research is contained in this podcast. It’s the smoothest lightning bolt structure I’ve found.

Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do was an essential model to follow. Lee provided a birds-eye view of martial arts as a whole through Jeet Kune Do. He enabled martial arts to reassess their nature and emphasize adaptability, self-expression, mindfulness and minimalism.

Martial arts is an ancient artifact we can appreciate today like a hands-on exhibit. Plus, we're welcomed to push it to its limits. The more we push it, the deeper we go with our mental discipline. We’re even welcomed to modernize martial arts. Like adding belts to it, which is a 100-year-old modern feature on a 3,000 year-old discipline. We’re also seeing it evolve with mixed martial arts, which has clearly been inspired by Jeet Kune Do philosophy. Ah-mazing.

Meta Zen is an intellectual exhibit to be pushed to its limits. It’s the ideal companion for all paths of perseverance. It's a universal philosophy. 

Is this sinking in?

Our ancestors built a tunnel through a significant mountain for future generations like ours and the light at the end of the tunnel is closer than it's ever been before.

Welcome to Meta Zen. The most ambitious podcast on the planet.

I'm Marc Bubel, your host…and founder of Moxie Frontier, a business ethos consultancy—we unlock human potential…from the awakening inner soul of businesses…to the far reaches of their goodwill. We unlock what technology can’t.

***Settling the dust

Let's dispel some of the misconceptions surrounding this topic.

No. You'll not acquire psychic powers like levitation. 

No, it won’t feel like the high from a psychedelic drug either.

No, it’s not like an endless party. 

No, we will not acquire infinite wisdom. 

We’ll have pure consciousness with a bonus feature: we’ll know beyond a shadow of a doubt, we’ve pushed past all the noise and become who we were meant to be. It's like waking up first thing in the morning and hearing the birds or the winter wind reminding us it's going to be another ah-mazing day.

Maybe you think I'm crazy but I promise you, future generations will definitely have this reminder… and it's because people in your generation think our ancestors were onto something. 

Why put it off when you can enjoy the benefits today?

Pure consciousness

Let’s return to level ground.

There are two details for achieving Zen, aka pure consciousness.

Number one

Whatever preoccupies our minds fades away into oblivion. What remains is our clear mind.

For clarity, this is not pretending whatever could preoccupy our mind doesn't exist. 

It's knowing different points of view are just options to consider. Maybe now or at a later date. 

Number two

Imagine you have pure consciousness and it has been with you for who knows how long without interruption. I bet, your curiosity will start imagining some interesting ideas. Like taking some of the techniques in this podcast to the next level. 

In other words, you would begin deliberately contributing to fruitful conversations and the foundation to…heaven on earth.

Sometime in the next few days, familiarize yourself with pure consciousness. 

In the middle of the day, go to your bedroom, open a window if you like, and sit on the end of your bed for one minute with your eyes closed. Listen to the different sounds you hear, and let no words float around your mind. Those sounds paint a picture of your environment. Through this minute reflection, you get a sense of how patient the world is. Maybe this minute felt like time had stood still. 

This experience is pure consciousness. Your attention is on the present moment. When we get skilled at pure consciousness, we can begin using it to achieve great things, which all of the world’s greatest artists have done. 

This is why someone like Leonard Cohen maintained his Jewish faith while also becoming ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk. Notice what he did with pure consciousness. 

Pure consciousness is universal and we can have it by the truckload. Be a weekend warrior. Get into the arts. Build yourself up through the first 17 episodes of this podcast. 

It's like the problems that we’ve had for engineering or programming suddenly disappear because we’ve figured them out. It's like we've discovered the theory of relativity.

Eureka! 

Now we can get on with our lives and there's so much to enjoy. [rubbing hands together] What do you think we should do next? 

The sky's the limit.

And when I say, the sky's the limit, I mean 365 days a year from sun up to sundown. When we have a clear mind, why put anything off any longer?

This is pure consciousness.

This is Zen.

And, because I'm so literal with the description, it's Meta Zen.

This podcast is for people who know how to keep an open mind like entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, weekend warriors, scientists, engineers, technologists, mathematicians, military, firefighters, police officers, gamers and more.

This is the dawn of our new day. We as a civilization are becoming reborn.

***The belts

Unlike other paths of meditation that directly focus on tranquility, Meta Zen focuses on contemplation which coincidentally produces tranquility. 

This contemplative approach trains our mind to exercise objectivity, which encourages others to do the same. We can sit and meditate and we can meditate through conversations. We can meditate in every moment of our waking hours.

Another distinctive feature of Meta Zen is that it paces listeners through every stage from the beginner to the final destination. 

Like the belts for martial arts that bring practitioners to the black belt.

To make this transparent, here are the Meta Zen stages codified into nine colored belts:

The first is the White Belt. 

This belt gives the protégé the basics. It sets a wide foundation for the belts that follow. 

The second is the Red Belt. 

The protégé progresses to this belt because she enjoys the enablement Meta Zen has to offer. 

This belt explains the world's greatest ambition using the insightful stages our ancestors have given us. 

The third is the Orange Belt. 

The protégé has become awestruck by the insights and is now committed to orienting herself to achieve the Black Belt.

This belt matures the protégé’s understanding of the many sophisticated layers of ambition.

The fourth is the Yellow Belt. 

This belt shifts the protégé from her individual pursuit to that of a member of the most ambitious community that takes the sharp end of our unfolding history.

Yes, unfolding history. When we say, unfolding future, we’re leaving chaos in our wake. When we say unfolding history, we’re mindful of the indirect results of our efforts, which builds a solid foundation for our future. 

The fifth is the Green Belt. 

This belt informs the protégé of the lifecycle of community ambitions. With this knowledge, we have a component of the nature of our ambition that fortuitously contributes to the whole.

The sixth is the Blue Belt. 

This belt reveals the highest artform that enables our civilization to achieve its ultimate state of harmony. This belt enables the protégé to handle the greatest obstacles like the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids. 

Yes, this artform is in you and is wanting to break free.  This is your call to action.

The seventh is the Indigo Belt.

This belt reveals the mostly untapped and accessible philosophical concept that reliably creates step change throughout our history. It always has and it always will, which is why its trendline at the time of this writing is off the charts.

The eighth is the Purple Belt 

This belt reveals the most ambitious vision every listener can act on 24/7.

The Ninth is the Black Belt. 

With our successors launching beyond us, we earn the opportunity to venture where few have gone before. 

This enables us to venture into the unknown and come back to tell the tale.

Try this on for size.

Meta Zen is a mental martial art. 

It has a ring to it.

Segue 

This concludes the introductory episode. 

This is your opportunity to explore the philosophy that is woven into the fabric of life itself.

We’ll now shift our attention to the White Belt training, which is in the next episode.

As you are enjoying Meta Zen, enable people to stumble upon it. Buy some Meta Zen stickers from moxiefrontier.com and put them where you and others will see them.

The Meta Zen sticker is our invitation to explore our full potential.

It's a great time to be alive.